There is no reason for avoiding direct formatting in most such instances as
those you mention. In cases where the formatting has a particular meaning,
you may want to create a character style. This has two advantages:
1. If you later want to change the formatting of all the text to which this
style is applied, you need only modify the style. For example, in a
dictionary I'm creating, I want the defined terms to be Bold, C&lc, and
cross-references to be Small Caps, so I've defined character styles to apply
to these two elements. I happen to know that the publisher will change all
the defined terms to Bold, All Caps; the compositor (being an idiot) will
very likely do this manually, but at least I've *tried* to make it easy for
him.
2. In current versions of Word, Ctrl+Spacebar treats character styles the
same as any other direct formatting, but in Word 2007, it is possible to
remove direct font formatting while leaving formatting applied by character
styles.
--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site:
http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.
"Ridge Kennedy" wrote in message
...
I want to use styles properly and as much as possible, per wisdom or Word
experts. I also know that Word does funky things when a user boldfaces or
italicizes a section of text in a paragraph that is formatted using
styles,
creating a new StyleName + Bold in a list of styles.
So, in situations where a user wants to boldface a few words for emphasis
or
italicize a title, what is best practice? Is there a way to avoiding
direct
formatting of text in these situations?
Ridge (in New Joisey)